Future seekers need better rear-view mirrors

As a Unitarian Universalist, I have a tough time embracing the Original Sin metaphor in the discussion about where news organizations went wrong online.
Yup, there have been a lot of failures.
But what’s getting lost in the discussion is a very real record of some game-changing innovation and achievements.
Progress, it seems to me, depends [...]

Read Full Post »

Fair pay and fair play

Today is fair pay day. Here’s my part:
I got into the journalism racket back in 1975, when the newbies were relegated to the manual typewriters and when it was considered too demeaning for a male reporter to be assigned to the “Womens” section of the newspaper.
Although I’d completed one meager semester of journalism in college, [...]

Read Full Post »

The Twitters tell the story

I was asked to be the wrap-up Rapporteur for the 10th International Symposium on Online Journalism at the University of Texas at Austin last week.
The conference had the Twitter hashtag #isoj, and, partly because it is Webcast live, people were watching and Twittering about it in real time on at least four continents. (Here is [...]

Read Full Post »

Newspapers don’t own journalism

I always thought it was odd to hear flat out declarations that there can be no life on other planets in the absence of water. How egocentric! So you’re saying that life can only exist if it’s precisely like us?
Really?
That’s the feeling I’m getting right now in the woe-is-us, hand-wringing sob-fest about whether life and [...]

Read Full Post »

Students, Denver and the Fifth Estate

I’m in Denver today with a group of University of Nevada, Las Vegas students who are kind enough to call me their teacher. Fellow-learner is more like it.
Once again, we’re experimenting with the future of journalism — using the latest tools in different ways to help people get news and better connect with information, events [...]

Read Full Post »

See no AP, speak no AP, link no AP

I kept telling myself I was way too busy to compose a long, thoughtful piece about AP’s supremely boneheaded, wrongheaded, counterproductive and just plain stupid move to threaten to sue bloggers who quote and link to AP stories but don’t pay AP.
But I am never, ever too busy to vote.
So please count my vote in [...]

Read Full Post »

Sex, texting, secrets and media lapdogs

I’m shocked (shocked, I tell ya!) at the high percentage of prudes and fraidy cat nannies in the Nevada press corps.
It’s Nevada, for crying out loud, home to Reno, divorce capitol of the world in the north, Vegas Sin City in the south, and legal brothels in between. It’s a place where even the [...]

Read Full Post »

Grieving for the turtles and their keepers

When my brother was about five years old, I gave him a carved onyx turtle for his birthday. I still have a snapshot of his ear-to-ear grin as he clutched his palm-sized prize. He was so innocently oblivious of the war then raging across the American fabric and the death toll in Vietnam.
Turtles became a [...]

Read Full Post »

Raising hell and having fun

So keep fightin’ for freedom and justice, beloveds, but don’t you forget to have fun doin’ it.
Lord, let your laughter ring forth.
-Molly Ivins
I am one lucky journo.
So many times in the past 30 years I paused, looked up to the heavens, and thanked the stars that someone was actually paying me to do this fabulous [...]

Read Full Post »

Twitter 101

What is Twitter?
It is like a microblog, a place to say your piece, or Tweet, in 140 characters or less.
And it is a place to listen.
Unlike my soapbox of a blog, my Twitter home page is actually a waterfall of other people’s words, blended in a real time river from streams around the world. They [...]

Read Full Post »